Management is the root cause of our meta-crisis and a life-centric global coordination tool is the solution

To satisfy our needs and desires we are depleting ourselves, our planet, and its natural resources. As Otto Scharmer often puts it, we are collectively creating results that (almost) nobody wants individually. It’s hard to think of someone waking up to a new day determined to increase biodiversity loss and global warming, eager to raise hunger, social inequality, violence, and pollution rates, or looking forward to developing chronic and mental illness. But that’s precisely what we are doing as we carry on with our lives and watch our sleepwalking leaders determine the status quo.

Even though some of us are awake to see the ever-growing shadowy figure of Meta-crisis lurking in the dark, the majority still cannot perceive the interrelatedness of our meta-problems and collapsing institutions, and are blind to the fact that our short-term problem-solving mindset is driving even worse long-term issues.

So what are the root causes behind our major crises, and how to solve them? Are we even able to determine that? Jonathan Rowson argues that meta-crisis has socio-emotional, educational, epistemic and spiritual aspects in nature. And Theory U points out that the signature of our civilizational crisis today is the ecological divide (the disconnect between self and nature); the social divide (the disconnect between self and other); and the spiritual divide (the disconnect between self and self). Both authors signal the importance of awareness to guide us into a deeper comprehension of the issues as an initial step.

“We have to better understand who and what we are, individually and collectively, in order to be able to fundamentally change how we act.”  Jonathan Rowson

Additionally, in a recent podcast, Daniel Schmachtenberger made a reference to an 80’s conversation between David Bohm and Krishnamurti where they were inquiring about the fundamental nature of the problems in the world and Bohm said it to be the fragmented consciousness, which relates to Einstein’s quote on the “optical delusion of consciousness”. Meaning, the root cause of all our problems is to believe that we are a separate thing from the Universe, it relies on our incapacity to perceive ourselves as a piece of the whole. And this illusion of separation drives us into decision-making that optimizes for a part at the expense of the whole. All mistakes, externalities, and conflicts are reflections of us not acting from wholeness first.

In the article title, I mentioned management to be the root cause of our meta-crisis, but that was just me trying to be catchy and sell what I deeply want to work with. My intuition also drove me to it, and provided that the cause is at the conscious level, management and decision-making are what translate the cause into practices.

A great reference that combines the demand for a higher level of awareness with guidelines on how to turn them into actions is Allan Savory’s Holistic Management framework. In his book, Holistic Management - A Commonsense Revolution To Restore Our Environment, Savory shares his life experiences with managing land, livestock and fighting against desertification, which led him to develop a framework that enables people to make decisions that simultaneously consider economic, social, and environmental realities, both short and long-term. It guides us into considering the well-being of the whole, with ecological and land management examples.

“Any action taken to deal with a problem, to reach an objective, or to meet a basic need should not only accomplish what is required, but also enhance progress toward the holistic goal.” Allan Savory

This book is a tool. Savory has chosen written language (and courses) to serve the purpose of educating people and spreading his knowledge. I also want to work with the combination of a higher level of consciousness and a framework that helps people act and make decisions based on the well-being of the whole. But my tool of choice is a digital platform, a life-centric coordination tool.

The idea is not to force a technology into people’s lives but to watch their integrated management developments and understand where existing technologies such as blockchain, DAOs, and AI could ease and scale a successful model.

The impact and outreach of digital platforms are quite known and undeniable, but we are still discussing how to turn them human-centric instead of profit-centric. The business model of the platforms such as Facebook and Youtube is based on the hijacking of human attention, incentivizing addiction, fake news, and polarization. The stakes are so high in their search for growth and profit that they are even affecting country’s election and incentivizing genocide. Those aware of the issues claim for technologies that put human well-being at the center of the design, but we know better now that an anthropocentric view is still narrow.

That’s why I am aiming to design a life-centric platform. A digital tool that not only fosters the best in humanity but also accounts for and stewards all other living systems and their ecosystems. That’s the best of both worlds. It’s when we make decisions on how we can serve the Universe from a holistic context, using a medium that can actually outreach it.  And if we consider Gaia theory, a life-centric global coordination tool represents humankind embracing its role as Gaia’s nervous system.

This is the first text in a series of articles about SintropiaDAO